From Margaret Thatcher leaving Number 10 in tears to Gordon Brown holding the hands of his family as he walked down Downing Street into the dusk, the end of a premiership is usually bathed in some pathos. I have occupied a ringside seat for the involuntary departure of six previous prime ministers and for each of those fallen leaders there were expressions of empathy even from their fiercest opponents. To this rule as to so many others, Boris Johnson has proved the ignominious exception. His overdue defenestration has been as devoid of dignity and decency as his time at Number 10.
He is the only premier of modern terms to be fired because his lack of basic probity so disgraced the office that even his long-indulgent party could no longer ignore what he was doing to the country, their reputation and their electoral chances. Tory MPs were aghast, but should not have been surprised, that he sought to cling on even when it was long past obvious that the curtain was crashing down on this tawdry farce. To the last, he had a wanton disregard for anyone’s interests but his own. The result was 40 hours of wild mayhem when he refused to leave even as the government imploded around him. Amidst an unprecedented torrent of ministerial resignations, at one point it looked as though he would try to carry on with Dilyn the Downing Street Dog as chancellor and the rest of the cabinet portfolios shared between Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Larry the Cat. My money was on Larry proving to be the least incompetent. In a final desperate attempt to use a lie to save his own skin, it was put about that he would burn down the house rather than surrender the keys by trying to wrangle a snap election out of the Queen in order to swerve a fresh no-confidence vote.
When the unspeakable finally bowed to the inevitable, his sour resignation statement contained not a hint of humility, a scintilla of contrition or a murmur of recognition that he was the architect of his own downfall. A bitter address sought to present himself as the victim of bad luck, “relentless sledging” and panicky Tory colleagues. He and his residual band of apologists are trying to concoct a betrayal myth by depicting him as a titan tragically torn down by pygmies. The genuine tragedy is that he ever became prime minister in the first place.
When David Cameron and Theresa May announced their resignations, no one questioned their suitability to remain at Number 10 as caretaker premier until a successor was chosen. Mr Johnson has sucked the public trust so bone dry that many in his own party think he isn’t fit to stay in the building for a day longer.
Character is destiny. As some of us always expected, he was ultimately undone by his amorality, his arrogance, his indiscipline and his duplicity. A career of surviving scandals that would have destroyed anyone else fed his conceit that he was at liberty to break any rule and commit any offence against integrity in public life because he would always manage to blag his way out of the consequences. Many politicians have a casual relationship with truthfulness, but with him the mendacity was pathologically brazen. One of his former girlfriends, Petronella Wyatt, has remarked: “He can no more help it [lying] than he can help breathing.”
His defects were not cunningly masked during his ascent to Downing Street. The Tory party was fully acquainted with his biography of dishonesties and scandal when they handed him the keys to Number 10 three years ago. They knew who he was. They chose to pawn their party’s soul to the electoral devil to give themselves a better shot at winning in 2019 at the cost to the country of awarding the premiership to a man manifestly unsafe with it. However they justified themselves then and subsequently, this makes the party collectively complicit in all the squalor that followed.
From the attempt to rig the rules to get Owen Paterson off the hook to the crony express that sped lucrative Covid contracts into the hands of Tory mates, from the flagrant abuse of prime ministerial patronage to rampant law-breaking in Number 10 during some of the most lethal stretches of the pandemic, it has been one abomination after another with the Johnson regime. From undermining the institutions of our democracy to trashing an international treaty that he himself negotiated, his premiership has been characterised by reckless irresponsibility. Tory MPs and cheerleaders in the rightwing media continued to sustain him at the apex of power long after there was no room to doubt that he would explore further depths of degeneracy until he was gone. When Chris Pincher was accused of sexual assault on two men, Number 10 peddled falsehoods about what the prime minister knew about the history of this drunken acolyte before he made him deputy chief whip. Faced with yet another failed cover-up of a scandal, coming after a double-whammy of byelection defeats, the Conservative party was finally forced to stop deceiving itself about its leader. “Enough is enough,” declared Sajid Javid as he triggered a cascade of resignations by quitting as health secretary.
The great majority of the public had been saying “enough” for months. Even among those parts of the electorate that were once entertained by the Johnson shtick, the voters had realised that his jokes were at their expense. His Downing Street mocked the sacrifices made by Britain when staff there casually and repeatedly broke their own Covid laws. A series of false denials followed by risible excuses took everyone for fools. He should have been gone when he became the first prime minister to be found guilty of breaking the law while in office. The Tory party deserves not credit for finally evicting him, but obloquy for enabling him for so long.
Obituarists of his career dwell on his “genius” as a campaigner, because that was his solitary skill set. He pushed the Brexit vote over the line in 2016 with a lot of help from the foolish Mr Cameron. He won a big parliamentary majority for the Tories in 2019 with a lot of help from the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn. There was hubristic talk then that he had a decade ahead of him as prime minister.
Yet he had no idea what do with his victories. In his armada of untruths, the flagship mendacity has been that a Johnson-led Brexit Britain would enjoy “a new golden age”. He understood the power of oratory from the example of Winston Churchill, but boosterish rhetoric is just verbal flatulence unless accompanied by dedicated endeavour in service of worthy causes. Countless colleagues and civil servants have given scathing testimony about his shambolic and capricious style of governing, with no coherent strategic direction, and decisions made and then reversed on a whim. His only interest in office was being in office. The sole consistent goal of his reign was keeping himself on the throne. One of the most memorable quotes I have gathered during his premiership was from a former Tory cabinet minister and erstwhile supporter who said: “The trouble with Boris is that he’s not very interested in governing. He’s only interested in two things. Being world king and shagging.”
He not only unleashed chaos, he revelled in it. As the Covid casualties mounted, he refused to bring more grip to the handling of the pandemic. On the retelling of Dominic Cummings, the lord of misrule justified himself by saying: “Chaos isn’t that bad, chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge.” One of the unfortunate side-effects of his chaos theory of the premiership was that it killed a lot of people.
He has provided fresh evidence for the wisdom of an old saw. If you put a crown on the head of a clown, you do not make him a king. You turn the palace into a circus. What a shabby and shameful carnival it has been.
The Tory party will now lay on another circus. Roll up, roll up for a succession contest. Whoever wins will inherit a scarily formidable array of economic threats and social challenges. A first and essential task will be to try to restore some integrity to public life after the serial debaucheries of the Johnson regime. It will be an improvement if the Tory party can come up with a prime minister about whom it will not be the working assumption that he or she is lying every time that they part their lips. That is how low the bar has been left by Boris Johnson.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
